Sigh – Scenario IV – Dread Dreams (1999)

I used to be certain that Scenario IV was the black sheep of Sigh’s discography, but nowadays I’m not as sure. It’s admittedly at an awkward point between the nominally still black metal Hail Horror Hail and the psychedelic retro rock masterpiece that is Imaginary Sonicscape. Listening to all three gives me a better perspective on how this one fits in. In short? Scenario IV is the simultaneously the best and worst of both worlds, which is admittedly a stiff order for any album. It’s exceedingly ambitious, and there’s a lot of content that you could potentially latch onto and enjoy, but how does it all tie together?

Essentially, the problem with this album is that it’s too scatterbrained, even given Sigh’s generally experimental approach to music making. If I had to guess, the amount of trademarked asides here is about the same as before, but in a lot of cases, the glue that incorporates them into the songs is slim to nonexistent. This is especially problematic in those liminal spaces between tracks where it feels like Sigh just threw in whatever fragments they felt like using with no regards to what fit the overall feel of the album. This wasn’t really a problem on the surrounding albums, so what happened here? After I stepped back a bit, I realized that these asides weren’t taking a whole lot of time in and of themselves, but they were also interspersed with more conventional sections that  still felt more fragmented and random than before. I don’t know what caused that regression, but these combine to make for an album that feels incoherent and confused.

If Scenario IV had dialed back the musical excursions a bit (like on the last album), or even focused on writing content to match it (which they did on the next one), it might’ve made for a stronger, more cohesive experience. The individual riffs and instrumentation here fees like they were written for the earlier, darker, doomier flavors of Sigh; I’d say they would work very well on the earliest material if they were given surroundings that met their needs. There is also a good chunk of more direct, hooky writing on here that somewhat resembles what we’d hear on Imaginary Sonicscape, but those portions of the recordings suffer from a producer who was most likely trying to imitate the older material. As a general rule, Scenario IV sounds dark, brooding, and muddy, even when it probably shouldn’t… which is another strategic flaw in an album that can’t really afford to have more.

Overall, while a few tracks manage to master their unique constraints and difficulties, Scenario IV is a disjointed mess that generally fails to unite its disparate elements into a coherent whole. It certainly isn’t Sigh’s high point.

Highlights: “Infernal Cries”, “Iconoclasm in the Fourth Desert”, “In the Mind of a Lunatic”